One Nation has quietly abandoned its long-standing promise to bring back the death penalty, less than a year after leader Pauline Hanson said she supported capital punishment.
The party has been advocating for the death penalty to be brought back for decades, and said in 2001 policy paper that it wanted a referendum on “mandatory capital punishment for manufacturers and traffickers of hard drugs, and perpetrators of serial homicides, premeditated homicides and child homicides”.
But One Nation has now walked away from the policy, and Ms Hanson told The Sunday Telegraph it had never been put before the party’s national executives.
“The death penalty is not One Nation policy,” she said.
“The policy document being referred to is from 2001, a quarter of a century ago. I was not even in parliament at the time. It is not something people are asking One Nation to focus on.”
After the political assassination of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September last year, Ms Hanson told News24 host Chris Kenny she was “all for” the death penalty in Australia, and said “I don’t have a problem with it at all”.
“Why should the taxpayer be funding these people in prisons for over $100,000 or $150,000 a year? Why are we doing that?” she asked.
“I want a safe society and if you put tough sentences in and say ‘well mate, if you want to go out and take a life of someone then be prepared to lose your own’, I’m sure a lot of them wouldn’t go out there and commit these murders. I just don’t believe they have a right to live.”
NSW One Nation candidate Stuart Bonds also called for the return of the death penalty after the Bondi Islamic terrorist attack.
“Australia had a 20-year war against terror and it has followed us home,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
“My personal view is, in cases of extreme acts of cruelty and violence that result in the death of others, such as what happened at Bondi, that would meet the threshold.”
The backflip came just days before Ms Hanson and MP David Farley angered supporters by publicly stating the party’s immigration target was net overseas migration of 130,000, rather than a cap on visas of 130,000 as stated on its website.
Opponents of the death penalty argue it cannot be reinstated in Australia due to its obligations under United Nations treaty the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but Japan is also a signatory and still executes criminals, resulting in the hanging of an arsonist in Osaka last week.
Header image: Left, Malcolm Roberts, David Farley, Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce (One Nation). Right, notorious child killer Brett Cowan (supplied).
